All 10 David Lynch Movies Ranked By Weirdness
3. Wild At Heart
In this garish road movie inspired by The Wizard of Oz, Laura Dern is reunited with Lynch to play Lula, a young lover eloping with her man, Sailor, played by Hollywood’s maddest of madmen, Nicolas Cage.
Wild at Heart contains classic Lynchian tropes such as the evil matriarch, hitmen, Jack Nance being strange, seedy perverts, and extreme violence. Structurally it’s fairly conventional runaway road movie stuff, but it’s the movie’s tone that makes it so very, very weird.
Lynch has a penchant for strange, black humour. Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive have some genuinely funny scenes. The success of Wild at Heart’s humour certainly depends on your taste, but what gives it a very different feel to other Lynch movies is its prevailing tone of rollocking wackiness.
This results in hugely jarring tonal shifts. A man’s skull being caved in feels highly gratuitous (despite Lynch’s predilection for heads being destroyed throughout his work), and a scene where Lula is sexually assaulted by Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) is one of Lynch’s nastiest moments ever filmed. It’s tough to chuckle after moments like these...
Weirdest Bit: How can a scene where Glinda the Good Witch appears as a vision to Nicolas Cage not be the weirdest bit? It’s shark-jumping territory for sure.